…the famous midrashic tradition that as a child, Avraham broke his father’s idols. When Terach asked him who had done the damage, he replied, “The largest of the idols took a stick and broke the rest”. “Why are you deceiving me?” Terach asked, “Do idols have understanding?” “Let your ears hear what your mouth is saying”, replied the child. Bereishit…
…is coming. They return, saying that Esau is coming to meet Jacob with a force of four hundred men. We then read: Then Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed. Bereishit 32:8 The question is obvious. Jacob is in the grip of strong emotions. But why the duplication of verbs? What is the difference between fear and distress? To this a…
…of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of Abram, and together they set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan. But when they came to Haran, they settled there. Bereishit 31:11 Abraham completed the journey his father began. To be a parent is to want one’s children to go further than you did. That too, for…
…or pragmatism, nor even on abstract philosophical principles, but on the concrete historical memories of the Jewish people as “one nation under God.” Centuries earlier, God has chosen Abraham so that he would “teach his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord, by doing what is right and just.” (Bereishit 18:19) Justice in Judaism…
…meaning “to heap” or “pile up”. (Bereishit 41:49) To understand the concept of tzibbur, think of a group of people praying at the Kotel. They may not know each other. They may never meet again. But for the moment, they happen to be ten people in the same place at the same time, and thus constitute a quorum for prayer….
…you, ‘Strike Amnon down,’ then kill him.” And so it happened. Absalom’s silence was not the silence of forgiveness but of hate – the hate of which Pierre de LaClos spoke in Les Liaisons Dangereuses when he wrote the famous line: “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” There is another equally powerful example in Bereishit: Now Israel loved Joseph…
…Euphrates, and the well-irrigated Nile delta. Twice in the book of Bereishit the Torah sketches a portrait of urban culture: first, the Tower of Babel, second, the Egypt to which Joseph is brought as a slave. They are both highly critical accounts. In Babel, human life was cheap (when the Tower was being built, said the Sages, if a person…
…plain. It is a land of hills and valleys. It depends on rain – and rain in the Middle East, then and now, is unpredictable. Suddenly, in this discordant note, we recall a whole series of earlier episodes in the book of Bereishit in which we read the words, “and there was a famine in the land.” This led, first…
…historical note is necessary. In a key passage in Bereishit – the only passage in which the Torah explains why God singled out Abraham to be the founder of a new faith – we read: Then the Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and…
…are free, and because even the most hardened criminal can repent and change, there is and can be no such certainty in human affairs. A stubborn and rebellious child can grow into a responsible adult. (Indeed, according to the Talmud, Ishmael repented in the lifetime of Abraham) The story of Ishmael in Bereishit is an important commentary on the law…